After ChatGPT’s viral success starting in late 2022, a legion of corporations jumped on the AI bandwagon by launching their own AI chatbots. More often than not, these were extremely limited, intended for customer support, product recommendations, and the like. But what if the AI powering those chatbots could be diverted for other, more productive purposes? That’s precisely what’s been happening to Chipotle’s Pepper, a “concierge bot” launched on Facebook Messenger back in the summer of 2020, through which customers can place orders. Unlike many more recently launched corporate customer support chatbots powered by ChatGPT, Pepper uses an automated conversation algorithm called Amelia, built by software company IPSoft. Pepper started getting some attention online in March when inquisitive developers discovered that it would do much more than take burrito orders: it could respond to complex coding questions, and even write new Python code. Things escalated when a developer named Maksim Soltan, who goes by the GitHub handle @Gonzih, reverse-engineered the backend protocol powering Pepper’s chat function to build a new, production-ready LLM that needs no API keys: “free inference via fast food,” as Soltan described it.